EPT
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[Download for the interview is here]
It's pretty long so I bolded some key points.
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My name's Christ Sigaty, I'm Lead Producer of Starcraft 2, prior to that, it was Warcraft 3 and Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne. Starcraft 2 is a re-imagining and a re-capturing the magic of Starcraft, the original game. There's a couple reasons behind why we made the decision to do Starcraft 2 at the time we did. One thing was the development team that was available. We talked at length with the people on the team, about what they're interested in doing. And that(SC2) came up at the time, and that was actually several years ago. Another thing was actually technology. For us we wanted to re-capture the magic of Starcraft in massive battles, massive armies, large numbers of units on screen at the same time, while still having that sort of visual quality we wanted to hit. And we felt like we were there from a technological standpoint, so from our perspective it was right time, right place, and an interested team that wanted to work on it.
As far as the differences between Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3, it was actually a concious decision with Warcraft 3 to kind of seperate the things we'd established in the original Starcraft with Warcraft 3. We wanted hero-centric play, stack-centric play(huh?), much more micro-management out on the battlefield, a lot less resource management and that sort of thing back in the towns. And now with Starcraft 2, we're conciously making the decision to diverge both games(WC3 and SC2). We have Starcraft 2 going back to the roots of Starcraft, with massive amounts of units. You know for the most part if a unit dies for you there, it's not the end of the game. And then again on the resource model, we wanted to go back to that.. a lot more important, we're not going to.. you know, 5 peons on a mine is not going to be the answer. You need to manage and make sure you have the right number of gatherer worker units that are bringing in your resources and that sort of thing. So it was a concious decision to sort of separate the out the two different game types and worlds and universes and make them distinctly different.
When we set out to make Starcraft 2, we actually did set down some guidelines, and they were just roughly guidelines : that we are going to keep some old originals, you know, 'what units could we not live without.' Also even if we decided we could not live without it, what would we do to make it potentially different and make the dynamics different in Starcraft 2. It's an interesting dilemma, and we just play with it all the time, throwing out units and changing things constantly. It's an examination of each unit, we look at it, give it some thought, see how it will work if we were to do it in the classic way. We first started, to be honest, with Starcraft, put it in the game, looked at it, and started playing that way in our new engine. And then we just started upgrading things and playing with things and moving things around.
As far as why, not a 4th race? That was a concious decision we played with that idea, you know there are ideas out there. But for us, we felt like one of the strongest points with the original Starcraft was the diversity of the races and the distinct differences between them. But even though that was there, we felt we could really play up and even increase that diversity and make it something that is really even overly emphasized and that's the sort of thing we want to do in and continue to accentuate those differences between them. So, it was a concious decision to not add a 4th race and instead add that diversity.
Kerrigan, Raynor, and a few others will be returning and we are going to continue the story because we think there's a lot more there to say. But as far as Single-player goes, we have some really ambitious plans and some things that some people would be really excited about but we're not prepared to talk about it at this point.
As far as multiplayer and kind of backing it up and trying to ensure that Starcraft 2 is a game that caters to that... I mean it's kind of at the core philosophy of Blizzard, as far as being very tied into e-Sports; we're very tied into competitive gameplay. So, with StarCraft 2 we're going to try and ensure that all those things are met. We are starting at kind of a higher level I'd say, as far as trying to ensure that we're not worrying too much about catering to the layman at this point, somebody that hasn't played at all, but that will absolutely be something we emphasize later. Things like command and control issues, and things such as how quickly the UI responds, selection, targeting, those sorts of things are really something we spend a lot of time on, and we're putting that time in now.
We're still pre-internal alpha, we're going to go into internal alpha later this year. We're our own harshest critics, we have a very big company at this point [laughs] that we're going to run through, and then we'll eventually run through the public as well. So we know we're going to hit all those issues that deal with multiplayer upfront before it goes out there in stores for people to truly enjoy. Starcraft 2 is going to be released for the PC, when it's ready. In traditional Blizzard style, we've in the past taken 3½, 4 years to do it, and we plan to be a little bit more ambitious this time. As far as a specific date, we'll have to wait and see, we'll get into more of that into the months ahead here.
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The only place this has been posted in this forum is in the "hmm, why not show it on sc2.com" thread page 3 by Carnac, w/o any text labeling it as an interview so most people probably missed it.
